And All Work Stops

I’m sitting here late at night in the hotel working away as I build a survey. Let me say again, it’s late at night. Now I like my sleep as much as the next person, but late can be good. Late at night there is very little e-mail coming in. E-mail. You know – that nagging little thing that sits in your inbox and quietly demands a response. Late at night there are no phone calls. There are no updates from social networking sites. Late at night you can really dig into a project and just cruise . . .

 

Until . . .

 

Somewhere for some reason some part of the network goes down.

 

And all work stops.

 

The survey questions themselves are essentially written. I’m busy adding the login questions to branch my respondents to varying sets of questions depending upon their answers. Or rather, I was. Before the network went down.

 

This reminds me of an article I read earlier today. The point of the article is to highlight the inherent dangers of relying too much on cloud data and applications. A lot can happen. Servers can go down. Network connections can go down. Something between you and your data or app can go down. Of course when everything is working fine, it’s all very convenient.

 

But when something does go down, all you can do it sit, fume, and wait for services to be restored. I find it both interesting and frustrating that the very tools that enable us to do much of our work are also the same tools that prevent us from being able to do our work. Yes, a fascinating irony.

 

So I’m tired of sitting and waiting. I guess I’ll post this tomorrow. Sometime. When my network connection comes back up.

 

Reference: Google Users Live By the Cloud, Die By the Cloud

Notebooks Overtake Desktops

Reuters reports that for the first time worldwide notebook shipments were higher than desktop shipments. This 2008 3rd quarter shift has been a long time coming, and it will be interesting to see whether this is a temporary blip on the radar or the beginning of a sustained transition.

I have a lot of questions about why this is happening. Are businesses providing more notebooks/laptops to their employees? Some companies want their employees to be able to work from home and on the road, so perhaps the trend is partially business-driven. Are home users adding a second computer or are they replacing an older desktop with a laptop? Are more students choosing notebooks as the device that will best meet their needs?

Whatever the reason, notebooks mean mobility and mobility demands network access. Whether it’s WiFi, tethering to a cell phone, or some other means, users want to connect to the Internet. Everyone from Starbucks to McDonald’s has jumped on board with free Internet access, and it seems that more and more hotspots are popping up all the time.

Of course libraries have been offering free wireless Internet access for years, and with the shift to more mobile devices, demand can only increase. In addition to notebooks and netbooks, users are also carrying gaming devices and cell phones with built-in WiFi connectivity.

Our campus networking department recently advised us that we need to add at least three more access points to help distribute our wireless traffic. We’re currently wrapping up a major network reorganization which significantly reduces the number of publicly available wired connections in the building. While we were hesitant to do this, current network use patterns clearly revealed that we were spending a lot of time and effort to maintain wired connections that simply weren’t being used.

It will be interesting to watch the continuing evolution of user devices. As patrons access our resources and services with smaller devices, there will probably be more display options targeted to the smaller screens of these devices. There will definitely be more demand for network bandwidth and more devices on the network. And as easy as some devices are to connect, others are still not as user-friendly as one might wish. The preference for wireless access continues to affect the ways in which libraries approach in-building access as well as online services, and I’m looking forward to a new generation of applications running on these new devices.